English 313 Intro

Hello world! My name is Michelle Thomas and this is my blog for my popular culture class. I am 22 years old, and I am a senior at CSUN. I work and go to school full time, and I am looking forward to graduating and taking a break from one of my full time activities. In this blog, I am going to do analysis on many different readings and “pop-culture” things that we look at for our class.

In my opinion, pop-culture is any commercial products or media of any kind that is made for a general mass of people. While reading the article “Politics of Culture”, I learned exactly what culture from above and culture from below really meant. From my understanding, culture from above is associated with a hierarchal group in society that focuses more on how the culture affects their personal lives. This practice of culture was exclusive to a certain group of people who were particularly wealthy. These people had money to spare, so they would spend more to make sure that they were well “cultured”, which was looked at as a means to advance their knowledge of the fine arts around them. An example of what “culture from above” really meant was people who could afford the time and money to attend things such as theaters. These plays and operas that people from these times would attend would help to broaden their knowledge. It almost seems that these culture outlets were used as a way to increase social stance.

As time went on, the idea of culture changed. Culture went from being a social stance to being commercial products or media outlets that represented a mass of people. Culture began to represent different TV shows, movies, music, and other cultural things that had an effect on masses of people. In the article, culture from below was defined from being culture a person acquires from their families since they cannot afford the things that culture from above folk could afford. An interesting quote that explains this is when the author states, “Working-class people, on the other hand, will acquire from their family context and the schools they attend cultural dispositions that prepare them for lives at the bottom of the class ladder”. This is where the difference between culture from above and culture from below become most evident. If you really were to just focus on the words above and below, you could see that above obviously represents the upper class, where as below represents all other classes of people.






My e-mail: michelle.thomas.624@my.csun.edu

English 495 Intro

Hello! My name is Michelle Thomas and I am a senior at CSUN.  I was born and raised in Palmdale, which is about an hour away from Northridge.  I work as a Barista at my local Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf.  Surprisingly, I love my job and the people I work with, however, I could do without the customers at times.  I grew up in a very dysfunctional family in which both of my parents are heavy drug abusers.  Since this is the case, my brothers and I live with my maternal grandparents who have always been the best parents in the world to us.  My determination and drive comes from my birth parents, surprisingly.  My goal is to be the exact opposite of what they are.. as well as to make my grandparents proud.  I’m the first and only person in my family that has gone as this far in college, and my drive to finish is stronger than ever.  When I graduate with my BA, I am going to go back to school (hopefully) to obtain my MA and become a teacher.  I also have a slight dream of going to law school, which I go back and forth about.  It would be nice to go to law school and to practice law (the money would not hurt), but I am not sure if that is truly my passion like teaching is.  I guess only time will tell at this point!

So as far as the role I feel media technology should play in teaching, I stand at the view point that every child/person learns differently, and sometimes it takes unique avenues such as media technology to fully understand a concept.  It also makes learning fun.  As students, we can all relate to the typical power-point/3 hour lecture or the usual generic group work; but by giving different avenues such as blogging or videos, music, etc., it helps students to be excited to learn something new in a refreshing way.  I have been in my different classes where we had to read a play or a novel of some sort, and then the instructor showed the film in class.  I can honestly say that more than a few times it took me to see the film after I read the text to really connect different things and fully understand the texts.  However, I feel as though there always should be that happy medium of media technology in the classroom.  Teachers at any level should be able to incorporate media technology to help students learn in “informal” ways, but there should still be that discipline that comes with learning as well.  I’m sure everyone has experienced a subject or a certain text that they just did not want to study, however, this is part of learning and branching out to hopefully view things differently.  But I do think that a certain amount of technology in the classroom can be very refreshing and can open students eyes to different things they might have been oblivious to before.

My e-mail: michelle.thomas.624@my.csun.edu